Someone to Watch Over Me

Most of New York, indoors and out, looks about as good as the Chrysler Building in Scott's gleaming fusion of eternal triangle and killer-on-the-loose. Happily married cop Berenger is assigned to protect a key witness to a murder, wealthy Upper East Side socialite Rogers, and they fall in love. She has class, he has none. Would a slob and a snob go for each other? Well, possibly, since his professionally protective side is involved, and her poise is replaced by fear for her life. It is beautifully played, and the restaurant scene in which the honest cop finds himself unable to lie to his wife (Bracco) shudders with shame, dread, pain and helplessness. You feel for all three of them. There are splendid economies, too: Rogers' mirrored dressing-room registers first as a social humiliation for the cop, who can't find the exit, but later his intimacy with her surroundings gives him an edge over a killer. There's little waste, though the thriller element could have been tuned up a bit.